Along with the improvement of performance and a price reduction of small-scale computer systems, some home electronic products incorporate computers for the purpose of their control and information processes. Also, high-quality video and audio contents (e.g., video, music, and the like) are supplied as digital data, and multimedia contents including these contents are distributed.
Furthermore, the prevalence of the Internet as a worldwide computer network and inexpensive mobile communication devices in recent years allow users to easily acquire and enjoy these contents.
Also, home video devices are transiting from those that record broadcast as analog data and is used to enjoy video, music, and the like supplied via media to those which record moving image and audio data as high-quality, deterioration-free digital data. Also, with the advent of home-use video cameras due to the development of compact, low-cost video recorders, users can capture video images in their home and can enjoy watching them.
Under such circumstance, the volume of contents to be video-captured and edited, that have been conventionally made by broadcast-related companies, is on the increase.
Note that broadcast-related companies have sophisticated devices for video capture and editing, and engineers who have high skills for editing and organizing contents to allow easy understanding. But it is not customary to edit contents captured by home-use video cameras since required devices are expensive and expert edit techniques are required.
However, not only moving images captured in the home but also information and contents delivered to the home via communication means such as various media, Internet, and the like are increasing, and are changing to multimedia information and contents such as video, audio, and the like. Hence, an information search function of such information and contents becomes very important.
Since the infrastructures for distributing and submitting information such as the Internet have been expanded, end users can submit information, especially, video and audio. In the future, necessity of an information search function of such multimedia information and contents is projected to become very high. The search function must be easy to use, and various results found by search must be easy to understand.
Furthermore, since latest information and contents can be easily delivered in real time via continual connection to the Internet and mobile communications, it is very important even for broadcast-related companies and the like to efficiently acquire latest video image and the like and to, e.g., edit them. In such situation, a function of quickly searching existing information and contents and reflecting them in new information and contents is required.
However, data such as moving images which have large information volumes and capture contents that change along with an elapse of time are too bulky to store, and it is very hard to easily search their contents. In case of document data which is also digital data, it is easy for a computer to search for portions including designated characters and words. However, in case of video, audio, and the like, it is rare to search for data which is perfectly the same as query data, but it is general to search for a portion which is similar in some sense.
With the existing technique, a computer cannot sufficiently understand contents expressed by video, audio, and the like, and a search for such data contents is not satisfactory.
To solve this problem, a linguistic description such as keywords, comments, and the like which express contents and features of such moving images, still images, audio data, and the like, or nonlinguistic information that describes features of images and audio in a format that a computer can process is appended to the contents or information as information for search, i.e., so-called meta data, thus facilitating the search and use of such contents.
However, it is not always easy to adequately and efficiently append meta data to data to be managed. Especially, it is harder for an end user to append meta data to video data captured by a home video camera or the like since he or she has neither expert knowledge nor technique. Also, data search results using meta data must be provided in a form that is easy to understand for the user.